Thursday, October 1, 2009

A Controversy of Poets - The Deep Divide in American Poetry

Growing up in Napa, California during the 1950's and 1960's, I was more or less subject to the cultural opportunities afforded in public school, the local public library, and the one local bookstore. Our family was poor, we didn't travel, and my parents--though reasonably cosmopolitan--were completely unsophisticated when it came to music, literature, and the arts in general.

When I graduated from high school in 1965, most of what I knew about poetry had come from what I had been exposed to in my English classes, and whatever I could find in the library (where I worked for 2 1/2 years at the end of high school). This was mostly hoary old anthologies edited by Louis Untermeyer or Oscar Williams, often in double-columned page-spreads, and with the oval "portraits" of poets mostly long-dead. The idea that there might be people actually writing contemporary poetry was almost unimaginable, since the society I lived in would have regarded such activity as a vanity, or as a symptomatic form of sexual deviance.

Do I exaggerate? Not at all. Rural suburban California in the post-War period was a backwater, composed primarily of refugees from the East. It included x-servicemen, "Oakies" from the Depression, war factory transplants, and all manner of dispossessed arrivistes from other parts of the country. These people were unsophisticated in their tastes, and politically were what today would be described as "conservative" Democrats, for the most part. The burgeoning suburbs were filling up, experiencing the new post-War prosperity which our parents--who'd grown up during the Depression years--welcomed with unequivocal relief.

Into this still pool of cultural deprivation in which we lived, one day, dropped a copy of A Controversy of Poets, An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly.* I must have found it on the back shelves of the local book store, The Napa Book Company (run by the old Chronicle book reviewer, "Speed" Claus). Speed must have been into his early Eighties, but was chipper still, and would tell you about how he'd been tasked to read Gone With the Wind in one night, to get a review on the spike by the next P.M.

A Controversy of Poets was a revelation to me. I'd not yet read, or even knew about, The New American Poetry (Donald Allen); the most "recent" poetry I'd read was 73 Poems, by E.E. Cummings (Harcourt Brace, 1973) who could on no account be considered a barometer of contemporary poetic trends.** What was most obvious about this anthology was that its joint editors agreed about nothing except the utility of exhibiting their separate viewpoints, as they described it in their curt Preface:

"This anthology is designed to turn the attention of the reader away from movements, schools or regional considerations. Hitherto some of these poets have been referred to by commentators more enthusiastic than accurate as belonging to this or that rival--and hostile--school. Such poetasting has only served to distract the reader from the poem and to divert his attention to supposed movements or schools, whereas the only affiliation finally relevant is that apparent from the work itself."

The division in values and approach which the collection exhibited would have been instantly familiar to any poet writing circa 1965, the year it was published. Ron Silliman, among others, has described at length, and repeatedly, the crucial differences of this generic bi-furcation of styles of writing, which have their roots far back into 19th Century American literature.

It may have seemed an admirable goal, to Leary and Kelly, to "force" such hostile armies of the pen into the same compound, as an instance of controlled integration, but aside from this one occasion, there was no compromising effect, either then, or in the ensuing 45 years (and counting). Let's put the competing participants into their respective camps, with the Leary's "conservatives" on the left, and Kelly's "renegades" on the right (just for the sake of irony):

Gray Burr John Ashbery

Peter Davison Paul Blackburn

James Dickey Robin Blaser

Edward Field Gregory Corso

Donald Finkel Robert Creeley

Anthony Hecht Edward Dorn

Daniel Hoffman Larry Eigner

Theodore Holmes Theodore Enslin

X.J. Kennedy Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Galway Kinnell Allen Ginsberg

Melvin Walker La Follette LeRoi Jones

Gerrit Lansing Robert Kelly

Paris Leary Denise Levertov

Laurence Lieberman Jackson Mac Low

Robert Lowell Edward Marshall

Thomas Merton Michael McClure

W.S. Merwin Georgia Lee McElhaney

Vassar Miller Frank O'Hara

Robert Pack Charles Olson

Kenneth Pitchford Joel Oppenheimer

Ralph Pomeroy Rochelle Owens

Adrienne Rich Jerome Rothenberg

Stephen Sandy Gary Snyder

Frederick Seidel Jack Spicer

Anne SextonDiane Wakoski

W.D. SnodgrassJohn Wieners

Nancy SullivanJonathan Williams

Robert SwardLouis Zukofsky

Theodore Weiss

Richard Wilbur

John Woods

As will be apparent from my lists, I've probably gotten a couple of the "conservatives" in the wrong column: Would Dickey, or Lansing, or Merton, or Sullivan have been Kelly's choices? Without a program, perhaps I wouldn't know who's on first! Their writing sure looks old-fashioned from the current perspective, though perhaps in those solemn days, even the smallest braveries may have sounded revolutionary.

What this anthology showed me, then, in 1965, as a high school senior, was that there was a political or aesthetic divide in contemporary American poetry, that there were poets on the one hand who wrote in strict quatrains, in tended rhyme and sanded edges, and those on the other hand who wrote with warts showing, whose wild kick-outs and lurching gesticulations seemed uninhibited and untamed. My unformed tastes then would explain why, for instance, I found O'Hara's 'Biotherm' undisciplined, scattered and indulgent, or Zukofsky's 'Poem Beginning "The"' so mysterious and arcane. As a fan of light verse, I would certainly have seen the tremulous faulty wit in X.J. Kennedy's 'A Water Glass of Whisky', or recognized Ferlinghetti's stale doggerel (even then) as the dated nonconformism it was. There were a few names I knew: Richard Wilbur, whose achingly polite and gentle rhetoric seemed like the adult version of what my parents may have imagined I myself should become; Gary Snyder, whose backwoods pretensions evoked our family camping trips to the Sierras; or W.S. Merwin's fashionable "European" seriousness; or Snodgrass's familiar Tennysonian elegy 'Heart's Needle'.

A Controversy of Poets was, in fact, a unique moment not only in my writing life, but perhaps in the history of American poetry itself. An attempt to initiate a reconciliation at the precise moment in time that the crisis of modernity was coming to a head. Perhaps the last chance there was to broker some kind of rapprochement between the hostile camps.

Clearly, the terms of the dialectic which A Controversy proposed/described have changed little since then. Today, it is as difficult to theorize a unified field of literary taste as it would have been then, and the lines may seem at times as graphically divisive as ever. Who, today, would think to mention Silliman's Alphabet in the same breath with Robert Pinsky's Collected Poems? A yawning gulf separates them, not only in terms of what kind of audience their work implies (and is designed to please), but the respective aesthetic pre-conceptions out of which each is composed.

Silliman has chosen to characterize the conservative faction as being the "Quietists"--derived, somewhat bogusly or speciously in my view, from his use of Poe--as if to give some quaintly progenitive precedent for his own view: "The phrase [School of Quietude] itself was coined by Edgar Allen Poe in the 1840s to note the inherent caution that dominates the conservative institutional traditions in American writing." He continues:

"I've resurrected the term for a couple of reasons: It acknowledges the historical nature of literary reaction in this country. As an institutional tradition that has produced writers of significance only at its margins--Hart Crane, Marianne Moore--the SoQ continues to possess something of a death grip on financial resources for writing in America while denying its own existence as a literary movement, a denial that the SoQ enacts by permitting its practitioners largely to be forgotten once they've died. That's a Faustian bargain with a heavy downside, if you ask me, but one that is seldom explored precisely because of the SoQ's refusal to admit that it exists in the first place. Perhaps the most significant power move that the SoQ makes is to render itself the unmarked case in literature...while every other kind of writing is marked, named, contained within whatever framework its naming might imply. Hence Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New Narrative, the San Francisco Renaissance, etc. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the few cases in which SoQ poetics has named some of its own subcohorts, such as the agrarians or new formalists. These can be read, rightly, as the sign of a struggle within the SoQ over relations of hierarchy & institutional advantage. The agrarians, as it turns out, were successful, the new formalists it would seem were not. I choose the School of Quietude category just to turn the tables here to call into question the issue of paleopoetics being the unmarked case in American writing. If I am correct in applying a social interpretation to their activity over the past 16 decades, the only way to unhinge them from their position of hegemony through blandness is to name them, to historicize them, maybe even to rescue some of their forgotten heroes so that we begin to understand the pathology at the heart of their poetry."

He has qualified this tendency towards categorical nicety:

"...my approach tends to be strategic: I deploy categories when & where I think they will do some good, and only to the degree that they might accomplish this. When I'm hurried or sloppy, the strategic tends to devolve into the tactical, but I'd like to think that I'm at least conscious of that as a problem, even if I don't entirely avoid it. I prefer post-avant precisely because the term acknowledges that the model of an avant-garde--a term that is impossible to shake entirely free of its militaristic etymological roots & that depends in any event upon a model of progress, i.e., teleological change always for the better--is inherently flawed. The term however acknowledges an historical debt to the concept & recognizes the concept as temporal in nature...the avant-garde that interests me is a tradition of consistently oppositional literary tendencies that can be traced back well into the first decades of the 19th century, at the very least. The term also has an advantage in being extremely broad...."

As Silliman knows only too well, trying to make negative judgments based on a "progressive" description of literary history is fraught with potential, contradictory complexities. The very word "traditional" itself seems problematic, since what anyone (even Silliman) wants, is to define a preferred tradition that legitimates itself through the positioning of its choices.

What I find most refreshing about A Controvery of Poets, is its implicit acceptance of the notion that differences may not only be inevitable, but actually stimulating and useful. While it may be possible to say about a poet, like, for instance, Jack Gilbert, that his means are wholly traditional and predictably bland, the "stuff" of his sensibility is purely post-Modern: Intuitive, disjunct, post-apocalyptic, and solitary--qualities which certainly have more to do with pre-Modern, and even more certainly pre-Renaissance and non-Western sources and "traditions" than anything one could predictably describe as "traditional" in form or significance (as an historical/aesthetic accusation).

What, then, was I to make of an apparent monstrous unresolved stand-off in a literary landscape which I could not even begin to understand, circa 1965? Would my apprehension of the formal possibilities of writing poetry such as that which I understood through Zukofsky, for instance, be opposed by my appreciation of, for instance, John Logan, or Theodore Roethke? Would it, in other words, have been useful for me to have been persuaded to approach the field of possible voices--coming at me from multifarious directions--by imposing a sort of kangaroo court of discrimination, passing this one, rejecting the other, on the basis of how "traditional" or "innovative" each may have seemed? I would certainly have rejected that notion then, as I would probably now, except that the whole notion of "belonging" to this or that school or group or coterie, has crucial implications, not just for one's participation in the system of literature, but for anyone intending to pursue writing in a "serious" way, as a career.

In the years following, as I matriculated to UC Berkeley, Iowa, and beyond, all these issues and conflicts and tendencies would become more vivid and concrete. I knew, without a doubt, that had I pursued a more narrowly conservative track as a poet during my years at Iowa, honing my oeuvre and style to please the reactionary editors and judges of the 1970's, my career as a writer would probably have led me towards a role that my parents--and their world, god help them!--would have understood, on some basic level. How would I ever have explained to them--as I could never have done--how a poem of Robert Creeley's or Frank O'Hara's spoke to me in a way that Longfellow's or Sandburg's would to them?

That division, then, had deeper implications than mere literary styles. It expressed a schism in the possible audience for literature that was as real as the world that I had grown up in. The officially sanctioned body of acceptable literary taste exercised a subtle control over the means of dissemination. America's puritanical, artistically conservative and suspicious character guaranteed that a justly respectful and righteous attitude towards the familiar music of sentimental "verse" be maintained, against the untutored, rebellious experimenters.

W.H. Auden has said that the reason for such variety [in A Controversy] is that America has no traditions, and that each artist struggles to create one--to which he can subsequently be faithful. The riches of modern American poetry he ascribes to the solitude and independence in which the creative American mind comes to its own consciousness of itself.*** I myself made a point very like this, when I insisted in an online comment stream that the reason American poetry can claim so many variant channels is that it's too large to be unified (as it is in France or England): It's a collection of regional entities, with the Mid-Atlantic region (the powerhouse of publishing and reviewing) showing the greater dominance, but without the vertical integration so characteristic of European centres. Thus, we have San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the South, The Mid-West, New England, the Prairie, and even our foreign "exile" contingent--all as separate, distinct, places, with separate, identifiable periods, with isolate(d) individuals scribbling away in a relative remoteness which makes them gratifyingly forsaken!, at least in the orderly, controlled manner in which American decency and propriety is interpreted.

Ultimately, then, the effect upon me of this anthology, when I first acquired it, was of an eclectic debate. Unlike the Untermeyer and Williams carousels, which made of each poet a tended plot, with just the right amount of fertilizer and irrigation to keep it alive, the joint editors of A Controversy of Poets allowed their readers to imagine that the ultimate poetics was literally up for grabs, with the outcome very much in doubt. It didn't presume to say that everyone should, or could, think of all of its exemplars as inevitably chosen, but of all severally engaged in a colloquy of separate voices, none more "correct" than any other. It even implied that the process of selection--which involved, after all, as it always does, a series of exclusions--was open-ended, as Kelly made plain in his list of an additional 39 names, on the last page of the text, which might, in his words, have made "an anthology of comparable merit." Indeed, one wonders how--despite all possible excuses--Kelly could exclude Duncan, Oppen, Niedecker, and Whalen--while including Blaser, Oppenheimer, Owens, and Jonathan Williams?

*This was a paperback original first edition from Anchor Books (a division then of Doubleday), which is probably how it came to my attention; I would almost certainly not have discovered it, had it been published as a big, expensive hardcover.

**To which could be added, John Updike (Verse, Fawcett, 1965), and May Swenson (To Mix With Time, Scribner's, 1963). Actually, I was a voracious reader of poetry in my early 'teens, but this was mostly confined to work written before 1940, i.e., Archibald MacLeish, T.S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, etc.

***This reference is taken directly from Paris Leary's Postscript to A Controversy.

38 comments:

Lansing is in the wrong column. My guess would be that Edward Field or Thomas Merton would be the other one whom Kelly picked. Field was in the Allen anthology (to his bemusement) and Merton is someone whom Jonathan Greene (a Kelly student from the late 60s) went on to become a friend & scholar of.

In addition to Robert Duncan, whom both wanted (and Kelly I think says so in the book itself), Georgia Lee McElhaney told me this past week that both also tried to get Bob Dylan.

"Such poetasting has only served to distract the reader from the poem and to divert his attention to supposed movements or schools, whereas the only affiliation finally relevant is that apparent from the work itself."

my dog-eared copy around here...somewhere..

a few years later Eliott Coleman (Hopkins),who knew that I was a friend of Joe and Jim Cararelli

in 1971 gave me a copy of Geof Hewitt's QUICKLY AGING HERE)

which includes a poem by Joe

and I discovered Sophia Castro-Leon, Gregory Orr and (my first taste of far-out) haiku (by Luke)

between all of this that you mention and "life" by 1975 I dropped out..

back in in about 2000to find

10,000 Poetry Schools and Clubs/Clubbies...

My greatest fear? that if I drop out (again) nowwhen I drop back inI'll be dead!

"Such poetasting has only served to distract the reader from the poem and to divert his attention to supposed movements or schools, whereas the only affiliation finally relevant is that apparent from the work itself."

IF the main criterion is empirical writing based on the nitty gritty of observed experienced, and the school on the right-hand's central quality is about observation, and the school on the let-hand's quality is about manipulation of language as abstracted from reality, then all LANGUAGE poets would have to go into the left-hand column.

War is a good thing, but only if it has a good end. I didn't like Dickey's book about the kayakers in the south.

I don't think people are "vicious," although Ginsberg was that, but only in an older sense of the word, having to do with "vice." I think people are generally principled, and can't live without good principles, and that the left is utterly without principles, but in this case the left is the right and vice versa.

I might make a list of poets in which principled stands as the central criterion. Who could we then put into the principled category? Marianne Moore, for sure.

Who else?

It's not a common trait among poets, because they tend to celebrate the vices, and thus to be vicious, at least in that sense.

There's been a recent autobiography about Dickey that shows how vicious he was, too, very manipulative, and kind of icky throughout.

untermeyer still lives with mesometimes i go back to that anthology of hayden carruththat which is great within is

coming out of college i thought i understood berryman bly and ransomand a smattering on both sides of your listroethke was a friend as was richard hugo friends i carried with me in my pocket and read when stranded as was often the casei didn't know merton was a poet until i entered the monastery

as a genuine feminine voice i found louise bogan to be most clearin much the way i find your clarity

poets should fight it out a bit i guess why not some riots over poetry some washington demonstrations

perhaps the next major divide will be between poets who insist on tactile approaches to writing like pencils and old typewriters and those who are purely new tech poets twitter poets

between you and ron and kirby and ed i feel like i've been treated to a great cybercourse in real contemporary liti appreciate knowing the names i did not know

i ruminate more these dayschomp chomp

our cloister poetfr killian mcdonald just walked in the roomhe copies his verse from his cell and walks up the stairs to retrieve the texts from the copymachinein his elder years taking wit to task amid the varied religious themes and characterswhile i sit here bewildered that poetry happens at all

Corso and Kerouac were apparently both in favor of full-prosecution of the Vietnam War, but the evidence has been swept under the rug. They talked about it in public conferences from the period. I think this points to their principled qualities. The left has no principles.

One of the great problems I see is that a poet needs principles, but also needs to unite them with facts on the ground.

You can't have an empirical poetry without some overriding sense of a paradigm to put them in.

Marianne Moore had a completely different paradigm than most, having grown up within the church and never having left it. But she is still wonderfully empirically focussed, detailing actual experiences.

Ted Williams' head is cryogenically preserved in a laboratory in California against the wishes of Williams' own will: he wished to be cremated and dropped in the Atlantic. I read that in the New York Daily News this morning.

Yeah, but I didn't want the post just to be an advertisement for the editors' choices.

What I found inspiring was what I said:

"...the joint editors of A Controversy of Poets allowed their readers to imagine that the ultimate poetics was literally up for grabs, with the outcome very much in doubt. It didn't presume to say that everyone should, or could, think of all of its exemplars as inevitably chosen, but of all severally engaged in a colloquy of separate voices, none more "correct" than any other..."

--that the outcome wasn't fixed, you know? That you could have it all and not come unglued. For years, afterwards, right through my Iowa years and beyond, it bothered me--how to reconcile it. Those two worlds insulated from each other. Sort of like having your wife meet your mistress, or as I say in that last prose poem in Wittgenstein's Door--that the two halves of my being might meet in the cave of the unconscious.

published by Big Sky Music via Chappell & Company who where up in The Citywhere I got my 'hot-off-the-press copy in 1970

from Bob's hand to mine...should of got him to sign it..

there are some neat photos in this on back cover is an very young Bob Dylan maybe 14 with a gitter almost as big as he is and a smiling black-woman blues singer at piano I forget her name his first "teacher" etc

i once recited the full text of "visions of johanna"to a young crowd with dylan awarenessthey expressed amazement that the song actually had a narrative threadso yeah why notenough of the ivory tower preachingin some ways dylan is a geekhe managed to protect himself pretty welllargely out of necessitywhereas neil young sort of hurled himself into the dust and clutter of north americayoung i always felt tapped a deeper root than dylan into the american scene

cohen refused the highest literary honor of canada because he said he wasn't really a poet anymorebut that he was chosen is a pretty big dealand i would agree

I wasn't wishing you'd advertised the editor's choices, but maybe show a bit, and incorporate into your discussion, their take on the divide, etc.

Let me do a lowest common denominator here. All the poems in Controversy) are basically the same. Letters, arranged in words, arranged on the page.

The real amazing thing about that anthology, I've always thought, is how it starts: all of Ashbery's "Europe." Think about what a mind-bender that still was in 1965, and maybe even today, to start any anthology but the most experimental with that poem...

"This anthology is designed to turn the attention of the reader away from movements, schools or regional considerations. Hitherto some of these poets have been referred to by commentators more enthusiastic than accurate as belonging to this or that rival--and hostile--school. Such poetasting has only served to distract the reader from the poem and to divert his attention to supposed movements or schools, whereas the only affiliation finally relevant is that apparent from the work itself."

Amen.

In my contemporary literature course my students (if they did know him) only knew Ron Silliman as the angry blogger who rails against anything that does seem avant-garde to him in his deeply reductive way.

My students did not know any of Ron Silliman's poems until I walked them through the sentences from "Albany" to which Under Albany refers.

After the unit on Language poets and Ron Silliman, one then asked me in an email last semester "Why is he so angry? What does he want from other poets? Is this [the poet of "Albany"] the same guy who comes across as such a narrow, sarcastic, bitter creepy guy--who seems so full of himself and his allies?"

I countered that very, very few poets are generous.

Very few poets can appreciate work across many styles and approaches.

But her questions still came: "What does Ron Silliman want from other poets? Why does he label and put-down poets in ways that he wouldn't want others to label and put him down? Why does it seem like he's 'hating'?"

Her questions cut to the core and my only advice to her was to stop reading Ron Silliman's blog and theoretical books and go back to his poems.

After this interchange I came to the following conclusion.

This is the incredible problem with poetry worlds today: Too much ridiculous, ego-filled, self-righteous bullshit about who should, could, would, does, or does not belong to somebody's trumped up school, or who gets prizes, or where they're published; and less attention to the actual poems.

By their very nature poems are textual experiences that always vex assumed classifications, even and especially ones that we think may fit or not fit our view of a particular genre.

It's really sad when a person's or a group's persona overshadows their poems.

Ed: How sad of you to call my ideas "horseshit" and to attack my teaching when you know nothing about it. You nicely prove my point with your nasty, cuss word-laced attack: that so many poets (like you, it seems) lack generosity. Alas, much to your dismay, my courses are routinely over-enrolled and I expose my students to a diversity of poetic approaches. What makes poets like you so seemingly nasty and mean-spirited? I will never know the answer.

Yeah, Well, I thought I was reading a fairly lively exchange about a poetry anthology until it devolved into sniping and low shot personal attacks. Thanks, Gary, for yr comments and for attempting to get people back on track. I just pulled my own copy of, A Controversey, off the shelf and found that I had actually put checkmarks in the table of contents next to the poets I had read or intended to read in the collection and not surprisingly most of them tend to appear next to the poets listed in the ' right hand ' column first posited on this blog. In my own case this was most likely done because I had probably already read at least some of the work and/or collections of most of the poets I had checked off, probably in the Allen Anthology or elsewhere in small press editions of their work available at the time in bookstores. The others, to my mind ' mainstream ' or, Gawd Help me, ' academic ' poets I automatically avoided as they were the ones who I had most likely come across in undergraduate classrooms at the time ( this would be the early Seventies in my own case ) and so the James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, Vassar Miller, Kenneth Pitchford, Frederick Seidel, W.D. Snodgrasa, etc. would have had no interest for me, and still don't, although I'm surprised to discover that I had checked off Robert Sward, Ralph Pomeray, Robert Pack and Donald Finkel. At any rate, I'm just angry now that I ruined a now collectible old poetry anthology by putting stupid checkmarks in it. Another anthology that came out a few years later that's largely forgotten now is Inside Outer Space, New Poems for the Space Age, An Anthlogy Edited by Robert Vas Dias in 1970. Sounds like it could of been a Sci-fi anthology of the time. Its Table of Contents ( mercifully left unchecked-marked) includes many of the same names as the Kelley with probably more ' left column ' names appearing, but it also includes some others of interest who didn't appear in Controversey: William Bronk, Kirby Congdon, Dan Gerber, Anselm Hollo, Ronald Johnson, etc. It was a few years later and so perhaps some of the above had not as yet begun publishing in 1965. LeRoi Jones certainly had and so had James Koller. Yugen and Coyote respectfully were already available. Both Rothenberg and Quasha appear at a time when neether had yet begun publishing any of their own groundbreaking anthologies. Someone no doubt will correct me if I'm wrong on this. Anyone else have the Vas Dias anthology handy?

Charles Causley is an interesting example of someone in that anthology -- which I remember too, and in similar circumstances -- who 'crosses'. My other great example of that on 'the English side' is Stevie Smith.

hay a non ee mussyoo takey ed way to seriousleeehe no meeneyhe just a lito lito tired and well jaded too but he ain't so meanreally he ain'the used to give me all kinds o shiteuntil it was clear i am a monknow he reeferz to meas br phuqqheadbut he's kind about ityou'll get used to the semantixtake the time to warm up to his ret O rikhe's sort of funand fun keeping around the poesie

that's a bit different than most of the El Lay hipsters' Dylanmann stories, which tend to be of the "we heard there was a par-tay in the 'Bu at dylan's compound , and tried to get in but they called the cops on us...." sort